How Effective are Toll Roads in Improving Operational Performance?

The main focus of this research is to develop a systematic analytical framework and evaluate the effect of a toll road on region’s traffic using travel time and travel time reliability measures. The travel time data for the Triangle Expressway in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States was employed for the assessment process. The spatial and temporal variations in the travel time distributions on the toll road, parallel alternate route, and near-vicinity cross-streets were analyzed using various travel time reliability measures. The results indicate that the Triangle Expressway showed a positive trend in reliability over the years of its operation. The parallel route reliability decreased significantly during the analysis period, whereas the travel time reliability of cross-streets showed a consistent trend. The stabilization of travel time distributions and the reliability measures over different years of toll road operation are good indicators, suggesting that further reduction in performance measures may not be seen on the near vicinity corridors. The findings from link-level and corridor-level analysis may help with transportation system management, assessing the influence of travel demand patterns, and evaluating the effect of planned implementation of similar projects

Hen or Egg? The relationship between IC-technologies and social exclusion

If we take a look at developments on the labour market, we find that the rate of employment stands in a close relationship to the introduction of new technologies and their social and cultural consequences. The immediate effects of new technologies on new forms of work-structures are, in fact, difficult to determine empirically. In order to avoid a strong technological bias in the scientific perspective, it seems important to consider carefully the normative objectives and goals, which are connected with the introduction of IC-technologies. But nevertheless it is difficult to define clearly the causes and the effects of new technologies as well as the technical changes and its social consequences. The intention of the article is to present the concept of social exclusion within the SOWING-project. Of course this concept is embedded in the scientific debate of the Information Society, which has a strong technological focus and represents the discussion of the Western, highly industrialized societies. But nevertheless the empirical findings of the SOWING project come to the general conclusion, that the rise of new forms of social exclusion cannot be considered as the result of the introduction of ICT, but as the result of the normative idea of a more effective and global organized economy. The social consequences of this development depend strongly on the establishment of a democratic procedure, which integrates the concerning social groups.employment; new technologies; social exclusion

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

An Efficient Monte Carlo-based Probabilistic Time-Dependent Routing Calculation Targeting a Server-Side Car Navigation System

Incorporating speed probability distribution to the computation of the route planning in car navigation systems guarantees more accurate and precise responses. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dynamically selecting the number of samples used for the Monte Carlo simulation to solve the Probabilistic Time-Dependent Routing (PTDR) problem, thus improving the computation efficiency. The proposed method is used to determine in a proactive manner the number of simulations to be done to extract the travel-time estimation for each specific request while respecting an error threshold as output quality level. The methodology requires a reduced effort on the application development side. We adopted an aspect-oriented programming language (LARA) together with a flexible dynamic autotuning library (mARGOt) respectively to instrument the code and to take tuning decisions on the number of samples improving the execution efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive approach saves a large fraction of simulations (between 36% and 81%) with respect to a static approach while considering different traffic situations, paths and error requirements. Given the negligible runtime overhead of the proposed approach, it results in an execution-time speedup between 1.5x and 5.1x. This speedup is reflected at infrastructure-level in terms of a reduction of around 36% of the computing resources needed to support the whole navigation pipeline

Joint Report of Peer Review Panel for Numeric Nutrient Criteria for the Great Bay Estuary New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services June, 2009

This peer review was authorized through a collaborative agreement sponsored by the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (DES) and the Cities of Dover, Rochester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The purpose was to conduct an independent scientific peer review of the document entitled, “Numeric Nutrient Criteria for the Great Bay Estuary,” dated June, 2009 (DES 2009 Report)

Regional Data Archiving and Management for Northeast Illinois

This project studies the feasibility and implementation options for establishing a regional data archiving system to help monitor and manage traffic operations and planning for the northeastern Illinois region. It aims to provide a clear guidance to the regional transportation agencies, from both technical and business perspectives, about building such a comprehensive transportation information system. Several implementation alternatives are identified and analyzed. This research is carried out in three phases. In the first phase, existing documents related to ITS deployments in the broader Chicago area are summarized, and a thorough review is conducted of similar systems across the country. Various stakeholders are interviewed to collect information on all data elements that they store, including the format, system, and granularity. Their perception of a data archive system, such as potential benefits and costs, is also surveyed. In the second phase, a conceptual design of the database is developed. This conceptual design includes system architecture, functional modules, user interfaces, and examples of usage. In the last phase, the possible business models for the archive system to sustain itself are reviewed. We estimate initial capital and recurring operational/maintenance costs for the system based on realistic information on the hardware, software, labor, and resource requirements. We also identify possible revenue opportunities. A few implementation options for the archive system are summarized in this report; namely: 1. System hosted by a partnering agency 2. System contracted to a university 3. System contracted to a national laboratory 4. System outsourced to a service provider The costs, advantages and disadvantages for each of these recommended options are also provided.ICT-R27-22published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe